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Restless Innovations From Alain Resnais

Isabelle Carré and Lambert Wilson in Private Fears in Public Places. Credit
IFC First Take

AT 84, with his silver helmet of hair, elegant bearing and crisply pressed blue blazer, Alain Resnais can look more like a retired yachtsman than one of Europe’s most senior and respected filmmakers. Yet, after 16 features and countless shorts, the director of “Hiroshima Mon Amour” and “Night and Fog” isn’t ready to settle back on a leather banquette and sip Champagne from a flute. Mr. Resnais continues to work and work brilliantly, drawing on a reserve of youthful energy and imagination to produce a new film every two or three years, full of surprises.

His latest work, “Private Fears in Public Places,” will open in New York on Friday. In its grace, assurance and quietly assumed formal inventiveness, it seems like a rebuke to the sprawling excess of more self-consciously avant-garde films like David Lynch’s “Inland Empire.” Mr. Resnais, after all, put giant rodent heads on his actors (in 1980’s “Mon Oncle d’Amerique”) years before Mr. Lynch had a similar inspiration in “Inland Empire”: hardly the most significant of Mr. Resnais’s artistic innovations but one that speaks to the restless sense of experimentation that lies just beneath the deliberately simple, carefully composed surface of his work.

Although his career has overlapped those of François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and other critics-turned-filmmakers who became collectively known as the New Wave, Mr. Resnais was never a member of their group. He, and contemporaries like Agnes Varda and Chris Marker, came from the liberal intellectual establishment of the Left Bank, while Truffaut and many of his colleagues were uncredentialed Right Bank outsiders, whose politics, at least in the early days, tended toward Catholic conservatism.

Mr. Resnais was particularly close to the writers associated with the nouvel roman, the anti-naturalistic, anti-psychological novels that emerged after World War II. He commissioned several of those writers, including Marguerite Duras (“Hiroshima Mon Amour,” 1959), Alain Robbe-Grillet (“Last Year at Marienbad,” 1961), Jean Cayrol (“Muriel,” 1963) and Jorge Semprún (“La Guerre Est Finie,” 1966), to collaborate with him on his early features.

These writers brought with them their sense of the malleability of time (hence the complicated flashback and flash-forward structures of the early films) and the importance and imperfection of memory. In “Hiroshima” the heroine, a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) making a film in Japan, is haunted by her recollections of the end of the war in France, where she was branded a collaborator. In “Muriel” the Delphine Seyrig character lives between a past she can’t comprehend (Why did her fiancé abandon her on the eve of World War II?) and a present she can’t control. (The fiancé has reappeared, with vague hopes of renewing the relationship but with his young mistress in tow.)

“Last Year at Marienbad,” also with the sublime Ms. Seyrig, has become almost the archetypical enigmatic art film, with characters identified only by initials, living in an otherworldly chateau and not quite sure whether they are planning future seductions or remembering old ones. For Mr. Resnais the linear narratives developed via Hollywood and the French “tradition of quality” (as Truffaut dismissed it, with contempt) could not incorporate the modernist sense of ambiguity and relativism; something new had to be found, a way of storytelling that discarded the old certainties of the strict chain of events, and entered into that mental space where everything happens at once.

The culmination of Mr. Resnais’s memory films is “Je T’aime, Je T’aime,” a 1968 science fiction feature about a failed suicide (Claude Rich) who agrees to participate in a time-travel experiment, only to find himself permanently entrapped in his own memories when the experiment goes wrong.

Up to this point Mr. Resnais’s films may have had scrambled structures, but they largely adhered to the naturalistic conventions of cinematic storytelling: psychologically rounded characters, a documentarylike fidelity to real-world locations, a desire to bind the viewer to the characters through the psychological process of identification. We experience “Muriel” more or less from Ms. Seyrig’s point of view, sharing her feelings and confusions.

But with “La Vie Est un Roman” (“Life Is a Novel,” released here under the sugary title “Life Is a Bed of Roses” in 1983) Mr. Resnais’s approach took a decisive turn. Working with one of Truffaut’s favorite screenwriters, Jean Gruault (“Jules et Jim”), he assembled a wildly free-form narrative, which he conceived through the old Surrealist game of automatic writing: One thing seems to follow another, with only the thinnest tissue of narrative connection, as the film moves between the original bohemian occupants of an eccentric chateau built as a utopian dream on the eve of World War II and the current guests of the chateau, now a conference center, who are attending a seminar on children’s imagination. Meanwhile those children are dreaming up an operetta set in the chateau’s imagined medieval past. Memory is not the complicating factor here so much as it is Mr. Resnais’s personal conception of the collective unconscious, a vast, subterranean territory filled with bit of high culture and low, of received ideas and revolutionary impulses, of spiritual yearnings and lustful desires.

The American art-house audience did not take to “La Vie Est un Roman,” most likely because of the new acting style — histrionic and highly self-conscious — that Mr. Resnais had developed with a new group of actors, including several who became regulars in his later films (Fanny Ardant, Pierre Arditi, Sabine Azéma, André Dussollier). The characters suddenly seemed cartoonish, and the actors’ delivery seemed more elocutionary than interpretive. Mr. Resnais had rediscovered the artificialities of the theater and began to use them, as he later said, to create “a movement back and forth between identification and distance, between sympathy and antipathy” for his characters.

A viewer raised on a diet of American television drama, with its tradition of light naturalism, would find little enough to identify with in the extreme posturing of “Mélo,” Mr. Resnais’s 1986 adaptation of a 1929 play, or the near-hysteria of “Pas Sur la Bouche,” his 2003 adaptation of a 1925 operetta. Characters who spontaneously sang were also at the center of “On Connait la Chanson” (“Same Old Song”), his 1997 variation on Dennis Potter’s technique of placing period pop hits in characters’ mouths. But it is precisely that sense of alienation that Mr. Resnais is looking for; he wants to discomfort his audience, to make us aware of the formal devices operating in any work of art, and particularly in the cinema.

In 1993 Mr. Resais adapted a set of interlocking plays by the British writer Alan Ayckbourn: “Smoking,” in which Ms. Azéma’s decision to light up a cigarette sets off one chain of events, and “No Smoking,” in which she declines and the action unfolds quite differently. All 11 roles in both parts were played by Ms. Azéma and Mr. Arditi — a classic alienation effect — even though Mr. Resnais was careful to reproduce Mr. Ayckbourn’s canny stagecraft, getting characters on and off the stage with a degree of plausibility.

Now, 14 years later, Mr. Resnais has adapted another Ayckbourn piece, “Private Fears in Public Places.” (The French release title, somewhat more concise, is “Coeurs.”) The cast is considerably larger. Mr. Arditi and Ms. Azéma are joined by Mr. Dussollier, as well as three newcomers: Lambert Wilson, Laura Morante and Isabelle Carré. But like the “Smoking” films, this picture is constructed as a series of two-handed dialogues, while the six main characters move through the desolate but developing area of Paris near the new Bibliothèque Nationale.

Beginning with the opening shot — a combination of digital effects and miniatures that allows Mr. Resnais’s camera to descend through the clouds surrounding the Eiffel Tower and pull up to the window of the apartment where a real estate agent is showing a prospective buyer the limited amenities — the film takes place in an atmosphere of forthright artificiality, an effect reinforced by the fake snow that does not cease to descend on the studio sets. As the main characters are introduced, each stuck in a different, not very happy place in life, the viewer instinctively cringes; the stage is set for yet another “interlocking destinies” film, in the predictable manner of “Babel.” But as the characters cross and recross one another, none of the expected resolutions occur, none of the characters are matched up with their soul mates, none of the miscreants are punished. In short, none of the promises made by the genre are even remotely fulfilled, even as the flimsiness of the form and the brightness of the colors suggest a world ready to concede to the characters’ desires.

As Mr. Resnais told a French interviewer, the effect he is after is one of “désolation allègre,” a blithe, jaunty despair. It is a phrase that perfectly describes the late films of Alain Resnais, as it describes the comparable work of Ernst Lubitsch, Max Ophuls, Jean Renoir and so many other the European masters: another way, perhaps, of saying “wisdom.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on page AR19 of the New York edition with the headline: Restless Innovations From Alain Resnais. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe